Last Post (Closing Words)

As I was reading through the posts there is one thing that i feel is quite important and has not really been touched upon enough: madness. In the dictionary, one definition of madness is the following: a state of frenzied or chaotic activity. Throughout the entire OIB program all the books, the characters and plots were all linked to madness. In general all the madness that we have seen has lead the the catastrophic downfall of the character. What I think would be interesting is to make to find a link or a pattern between all these different types of madness.
The books that come to mind when we think about madness are Frankenstein, Macbeth and Medea. If we look at these books we realize that madness is never a self inflicted condition. In fact the madness that is relevant in these books always due to an outside source. This is interesting because we think of madness as a creation of the subjects conscience.
In Macbeth the madness is clearly provoked by the witches. As they say, the seed is planted but he will decide how it will grow. Without the witches offer Macbeth would have never had any motive to become rogue and go against his own king. Frankenstein seems like a more difficult madness to determine. At first it seems that the madness is self inflicted from the start of his undertaking. Only after he completes his work do we realize that his true madness is due to Creature. His activity becomes completely incoherent with his state of mind and to a certain degree creature pushes the limits of his "hell on earth." Finally in Medea we have another interesting situation where we know that Medea's character is already a little bit chaotic. However i think that her actions before Jason were never really proof of madness but more a very strong character. He see hints of this during his confrontation with Jason but killing her children and Jason's wife a proof a chaotic activity without reason, only to return to another power thriving husband in Athens.
So we see that the madness in all of these books is not really the object of a subconscious creation but in fact of product of their own environments. This allows to show that these characters are in fact tragic heros, subject to their environments. Since madness is not controlled by the subject, it can only be additional proof the the characters tragic state.